Vast and Fertile Ground in Africa for Science to Take Root

UGANDA A classroom at the new computer science college at Makerere University in the capital, Kampala. A Ph.D. program has also begun.Credit
Tadej Znidarcic for The New York Times

He might have been content simply to teach thousands of university students in Uganda how to use computers, assemble them into networks, manage them and write basic software programs. In a poor African country with one of the world’s fastest-growing populations and rising Internet use, that alone would have been an enormous achievement.

But Venansius Baryamureeba had bigger ideas. In 2005, when he returned home with a doctorate from the University of Bergen in Norway, he was just one of a handful of computer scientists in Uganda. And his timing was right. The largely agricultural economy had been growing by about 7 percent annually, propelling an enormous expansion of the upper middle class and the urban elite’s aspirations for advanced training in science and engineering.

Emboldened by Uganda’s relative peace and prosperity, Dr. Baryamureeba founded a new college that includes departments of computer science and computer engineering at creaky Makerere University, in Uganda’s capital, Kampala. At the top of a hill near the university’s entrance, overlooking the derelict law school to one side and a derelict school mosque to the other, two gleaming glass buildings went up seemingly without a hitch. So many undergraduates swarmed them that the faculty held classes at midnight to accommodate them.

Dr. Baryamureeba wanted more than a vocational school; he also created a graduate program he hoped would someday turn out dozens of Ph.D. scientists who would themselves become college professors and help push the boundaries of global research.

Improbably, his vision is gaining traction at Makerere. Young homegrown scientists there are now nearing completion of their Ph.D.’s. And faculty members are carrying out cutting-edge experiments. They are seeking to endow cellphones with the “intelligence,” embedded in tiny software programs animated by mathematical algorithms, to identify diseases in crops or malaria in a person’s bloodstream.

Ernest Mwebaze, a doctoral student and lecturer, said there are still serious obstacles to pursuing such research in Uganda, including unreliable Internet service and power failures. But he also said the potential upside is huge.

“Uganda offers several unique research challenges and problems whose solutions can actually have a greater marginal benefit than, say, solutions to problems in Europe,” he said.

Each Monday, in a laboratory of thrumming computers, Mr. Mwebaze teaches a small class on artificial intelligence to 10 graduate students, highlighting this esoteric field, the subject of his doctorate research.

And the potential for Africans trained in Africa to conduct science attuned to the realities of Africa is not limited to computing. “There’s a growing interest in research, and science generally, in the region,” said Calestous Juma, a Harvard professor who specializes in the study of technology and development.

The rapid spread of cellphones has fueled an appreciation among Africans for the practical uses of science and technology. And the children of the African elite are also seeing career possibilities in computing science and engineering, beyond the traditional disciplines of medicine, law and finance or the more typical scientific callings of crop and soil science.

Photo

A student project.Credit
Tadej Znidarcic for The New York Times

“Computer science appeals to a generation of urban students raised on a diet of digital devices,” said Chanda Chisala of Zambia Online, a software development company and Internet provider in the Zambian capital, Lusaka.

The field also may appeal to chronically underfinanced African universities because the study of computer science is relatively inexpensive. No big atom smashers are needed, as in physics; no giant telescopes, as in astronomy.

Computer science in Africa, to be sure, is still held back by the perception that it is preferable to study and work in Europe or the United States, even if that means leaving Africa permanently. This must change for computer science to flourish in the region. Georgia Tech researchers recommended in a study that African educators reinforce efforts to mold computer science curriculum to meet “local needs.”

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A shortage of skilled teachers also remains a problem. The continent’s leading computer science departments — based on research publications — are all in South Africa. Yet even there, the number of university-level teachers is limited. “Our C.S. departments are much smaller than counterparts in the U.S.,” said Bill Tucker, an American who is a senior lecturer at the University of Western Cape.

And differing ethical practices in African and American academic institutions complicate matters. When V. S. Subrahmanian, a computer scientist at the University of Maryland, decided to forge a research partnership last year with Nigerian professors, he was enthusiastically received. But when he provided a Nigerian computer center with data compiled by Maryland, the center started selling it. Dr. Subramanian, who thought the data should have been openly available for scholars, found the experience “very troubling.”

Dr. Baryamureeba’s commitment has helped Makerere overcome such obstacles. He now leads the entire university, ensuring that computer science and engineering have high-level support. Partnerships with universities in Norway and the Netherlands have also proved crucial. Graduate students from Uganda have been able to study both at home and abroad. And the European universities promise not to poach them, requiring that the students return to Uganda to get their doctorates.

There’s also a palpable sense among young scholars that Africa is cool — and that universities are improving just enough to advance the scientific ambitions of Western scientists.

Consider John Quinn, a Scot. He attended Cambridge and received a doctorate in computer science from the University of Edinburgh. Searching for an unconventional research experience, he contacted Makerere just as Dr. Baryamureeba was casting about for international talent to bolster his faculty. Dr. Quinn accepted, and has never looked back. An artificial intelligence research group he formed has received financing from Microsoft and Google. One project involves designing code that turns a cellphone into a sophisticated microscope. He presented his research on diagnosing malaria over the phone at an international conference in San Francisco in August.

“There’s a growing awareness of the need to focus, to specialize and to become internationally competitive,” Dr. Quinn said of himself and his colleagues.

One potentially practical and profitable benefit partly explains the interest of computer companies in Dr. Quinn’s research: Turning cellphones into cheap microscopes and pattern-recognition devices could help people in the developed world lower costs of instant diagnosis of minor medical problems.

So far, Dr. Quinn’s reputation has only been enhanced by his work in Uganda, and he’s earning decent pay. Postdoctoral salaries for European computer scientists are not that much different from the roughly $3,000 a month Dr. Quinn earns at Makerere. That has him thinking he will stay awhile in Kampala. He’d initially planned to stick it out for two years, but he’s now already four years into his African university tenure and sees a lot of running room in computer science — for himself, and for Africa.

Josh Kron contributed reporting from Kampala, Uganda.

A version of this article appears in print on December 6, 2011, on Page D4 of the New York edition with the headline: Vast and Fertile Ground in Africa for Science to Take Root. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe